


Bloody Sunset

by sinkingsidewalks



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Mild Mentions of Blood, Pre-Sochi Era, because who would I be if I wasn't writing angst?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-06-22 09:15:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15578616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinkingsidewalks/pseuds/sinkingsidewalks
Summary: Tessa wrapped a towel around her hand and bled right through it, staining it, to answer the door. She’d cut her hand grabbing her blade going into a twizzle at their afternoon practice session, a flat slice in the meat of her palm, exactly parallel to the crease of her heart line.His patience only lasted another twenty seconds – long enough for her to get through the bathroom door and around one of the two double beds cramped into the space – before the lock on the door clicked and beeped and opened. Of course he had a key.





	Bloody Sunset

**Author's Note:**

> novel writing has been kicking my ass this week so I wrote this instead today to tell myself that I was at least meeting my bare minimum word count. this is supposed to be set in the pre-Sochi season, but it's vague enough that it could be at any of the more tumultuous times in their career. I hope you like it, let me know.  
> This is a work of complete fiction.

There was a bloody looking sunset outside the window and a knock on her hotel room door. 

“Just a minute!” 

She swore as more red dripped out over the white porcelain sink and caught in droplets of water to slide down the drain. Butterfly sutures and skin glue and plastic sheet bandages littered the bathroom countertop along with mascara and toothpaste and sticky floral perfume. 

Tessa wrapped a towel around her hand and bled right through it, staining it, to answer the door. She’d cut her hand grabbing her blade going into a twizzle at their afternoon practice session, a flat slice in the meat of her palm, exactly parallel to the crease of her heart line. 

His patience only lasted another twenty seconds – long enough for her to get through the bathroom door and around one of the two double beds cramped into the space – before the lock on the door clicked and beeped and opened. Of course he had a key. 

“ _Shit_ , Tess.” He greeted her with eyes wide, looking right at her, and she glanced down to realize that blood was running over her wrist. 

“Oh, fuck.” She brought the end of the towel around to soak up the line before it dripped down to stain the ugly beige carpet and turned back into safety of the bathroom tile.

Scott followed. 

“I think I made it worse.” She tossed the towel, painted like a Jackson Pollock straight from her veins, into the shower and examined her hand under the sharp white lights. Scott leaned over her shoulder, his breath on her neck, and they were both stiff, marionettes in the hands of an unpracticed puppeteer. 

“You definitely did.” He nudged her over until she sat on the closed lid of the toilet with her palm up on the counter. The wound – which was really two parallel cuts, sliced as she’d grabbed, then tried to re-grip her blade and the metal had slid against her skin before she’d fallen out of the turn – wasn’t particularly deep but any time she so much as shifted her fingers, any clotting her body had managed dissolved away and it reopened. 

“I already did that.” She said, as he pulled bottles from her first aid kit. Isopropyl alcohol and Polysporin. 

“Yeah, and I’m sure hotel towels are perfectly sanitized.”

She almost rolled her eyes, but didn’t. His forefinger and thumb circled her wrist and brought it over the sink with a gentle, guiding grip. 

The alcohol burned as he poured a steady line over her hand. It was fire in her palm, tingling into her flesh, then ice cold as it dripped down over her fingers towards the drain. She grit her teeth and didn’t make a sound. 

“Sorry,” he muttered anyway. 

The air felt particularly present when he stopped pouring. They both stared at her angry open palm while they waited for it to dry. Fresh blood bubbled to the surface. A shower in an adjacent room started. She wished he would fucking say something. But he just stood there and everything they hadn’t been talking about marinated in the room. 

It didn’t even hurt that much, she decided. In the grand scheme of things, it couldn’t. What were another few drops of blood spilt for their career?

She’d been hemorrhaging all over the place lately. Had actually managed a nosebleed, the first since she was nine, coming out of a lift the other day. The shock, then panic, on Scott’s face had been almost comical. His eyes bugged out, cartoonish and his hands had run over the back of her head and neck – like maybe she’d hit her head, like maybe he’d hurt her – so urgently he’d half destroyed her ponytail. All before she’d realized she was dripping red down between them and cutting it into ice with her blades. 

They’d missed the rest of the choreography and Marina had looked uncharacteristically worried. 

“Did you try to glue it?” He asked as he smeared Polysporin across her hand with a Q-tip and she felt another jolt of proportionally insignificant pain. 

“Yeah.” It kept cracking open, and she wanted to avoid having an ugly tan bandage over her hand in the short the next day. 

She watched him thinking. He studied her hand, pushed the seams of her skin gently back together, and surveyed the variety of medical supplies she took with them everywhere they went, as analytical as he regarded their practice tape. 

“Why don’t I bandage it for the night, then tomorrow morning we can glue it.” He knew her thought process without her having to explain it. 

“Sure.”

A piece of stark white gauze covered her palm and he wrapped medical tape, snug but not tight, twice in one direction – from just above the outside of her wrist to the flesh between her thumb and forefinger, then over the back of her hand and around again – then twice in the other – from the base of her thumb to just below her pinky finger. 

He brought her hand up to his mouth to rip the tape with his teeth then smoothed down the ragged end against the straining tendons at the top of her hand. 

“Okay?”

She flexed her fingers, still held in his hand. “Perfect.”

“Great.” He didn’t let go. Then he did, snatched his hands back so fast her wrist almost banged into the counter before she could think to hold it up on her own, and he started piling supplies back into the purple makeup bag that served as the first aid box. 

She watched as he packed everything away then rinsed pink blood out of the sink. Then he took the bag and tucked it into the side pocket of her skate bag for the next day. She followed.

“What did you need anyway?” They’d said their goodnights several hours ago when they got back to the hotel. She didn’t expect to see him again until they were meant to be leaving in the morning. 

“Oh.” He shifted and looked at his shoes. “Nothing really, I guess.” He flopped onto one of the beds and she was thrown back a decade and a half to what must have been one of their first out of town competitions. Scott, she could have sworn, had been more excited about staying overnight in a hotel than he’d been about skating. That weekend they’d won plastic gold medals and he’d eaten four boxes of smarties out of the vending machine at the end of the hall while they’d watched old Bond movies that played all night.

“Is it really quiet here to you?” He kicked his shoes to the floor and crossed one leg over the other, obviously content to stay a while. 

“I guess.” She sat beside him, legs folded under her. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

He sighed, too heavy to look so young. “It feels quiet.”

“Yeah.” She agreed after a moment of absolute silence, not a creak or hitch from the building, nothing between them at all. She couldn’t say anything more. 

There were so many conversations they needed to have but this wasn’t the place for any of them. She scooted so her back was against the headboard. 

“Wanna watch weird foreign TV?” She offered, remote in her hand, a remembrance of an old tradition that had fallen away with time and growing up. 

He laughed a small respite from the heaviness he was sure to be feeling. “Sure, T.”

With one hand she flicked on the TV while the other reached over for him instinctively. He took her bandaged hand gently and pressed a kiss into the back over the tape.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading. I'm on tumblr @sinkingsidewalks if you like


End file.
